This paper presents some issues pertaining to child and adolescent labor and their impact on health, pointing out the main structural characteristics which are responsible for and socially justify the early incorporation of this segment into the labor market. In Brazil, legislation governing adolescent labor is frequently ignored, showing the need to implement health surveillance programs invol...

Many have argued that if labor hicome is difference stationary, the permanent income hypothesis predicts consumption should be relatively volatile. In US an-gregate data, labor income is well-characterized as having a unit root; however consumption turns out to be relatively smooth. This anomaly is known as Deaton's paradox. We resolve Deaton^s paradox by providing decompositions of labor incom...

Advocates for the labor movement are understandably disheartened by the uncertain future of the Employee Free Choice Act. Underlying the EFCA strategy of union revitalization is a widespread belief about the efficacy of strong labor laws for supporting strong, high-density labor movements. In this paper I ask: How necessary are strong labor laws for strong labor movements? If not labor law, wha...

The natural rate of unemployment can be measured as the time-varying steady state of a structural vector autoregression. For post-War US data, the natural rate implied by this approach is more volatile than most previous estimates, with its movements accounting for the bulk of the variation in the unemployment rate, as well as substantial portions of the variation in aggregate output and inflat...